Uncertainty Trumps Realism in Kafka

Review by Breanne Boland March 10, 2005 Issue

Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura (who is and isn’t the Kafka of the book’s title) lives in the Nakano ward of Tokyo. He runs away from home to Shikoku to escape his father and an Oedipal prophecy, as well as to find his long-absent mother and sister, who seem so distant they may not even exist. Nakata, a man who lost his higher mental capacities during a World War II-era malady but gained an ability to talk to cats, is also traveling from Nakano to Shikoku, for reasons he doesn’t know, but hopes to be able to identify when he sees them. Guiding and protecting Nakata is Hoshino, a truck driver about to have a long-overdue awakening toward the world. These are the two main threads of Kafka on the Shore, but there are a handful of others, no less engaging, that weave—or weave around each other—to create the story.

Kafka ends up at Komura Library, a haven for Oshima and Miss Seiki, both enigmatic privacy-seekers who relish the quiet sanctuary of their workplace, which is based on an actual institution in Japan. Like Nakata, Kafka inspires generosity and guidance from people, and is taken under the wing of Oshima, a cool, collected librarian and my favorite character. Meanwhile, Nakata is also heading toward Shikoku with Hoshino, bound for a fate he isn’t certain of but won’t question either.

The book occupies an ambiguous space where everything in the world—people, events, locations—is either completely connected or completely disconnected, and what really makes the book hum is that Murakami never commits to either side. Every character in the book could be linked, but their stories could also be completely independent of each other. There is evidence for both, but not, as the book says of one character’s theory about his life, any counterevidence. The story supports both theories, and it’s that paradox that makes the story so involving. You can draw your own conclusions, but Murakami seems comfortable with you coming to no conclusion at all.

If you can revel in the uncertainty, and you don’t demand concrete answers and facts from your books, Kafka on the Shore makes for a long, satisfying read, dreamy and ambiguous as a parable or a fable. Many of the characters’ paths don’t even cross, so that indistinct parallels are often what allow the book to be cohesive at all. Shared locations, though not at the same time.

A hard-boiled look at reality it is not. Instead, the story weaves along, sometimes pushed along not by the characters, but by what seems like (or could actually be—again, no counterevidence) divine intervention. The momentum and most dramatic points of the book are generally caused by unidentified circumstance rather than by any of our characters. They act out of instinct usually, or just “a feeling,” rather than thought.

How you’ll enjoy the book is, I think, determined entirely by your reaction to the phrase “magical realism.” If the anything-can-happen way of it brings a smile to your face, you’ll probably enjoy the journey the book takes you on. However, if the bizarre and unexplained taking up residence in an otherwise normal story makes you irritated, Kafka and its sometimes leisurely ways will probably be a task for you, making you shout, “What? They need to find a rock now? Since when?”

However, if you’re good with the method, you’ll be good with the journey. Kafka on the Shore combines beautiful and intricate locations, clearly drawn and always interesting characters, and a lingering intrigue that I’d call a mystery if the story had a true solution to the questions it raises.

I did wonder at times whether the ambiguity of the story was always intentional, or whether the number of transformations it underwent in order to wind up in American hands intensified the vagueness. It was written in Japanese and then translated to English. However, I found the translation exceptional. I haven’t read a large amount of translated literature, so I looked for awkward phrasings or other remnants of being transformed so thoroughly. I found nothing. Also, it was originally published in Japan three years ago as a two-volume story, which had to have changed the feel and the pacing of it. Kafka has traveled a long way from its author’s hands, but I was satisfied with the book that wound up in mine. It was complex without being confusing, unpredictable without being unnecessarily erratic, and gave me a fine feeling of how the world is all woven together with the same thread, even if it’s not in a pattern we can recognize.

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